The “art” of reproduction

For those of you who use web searches extensively for your lectures or presentations, check out the post “The Art Of Reproduction” on the blog Visual Hint — the color of data:

“Type “Danae Klimt” into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair.”

“Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.”

“Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. (Go directly to the results if you like.) For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.”

hat tip: Nancy Alexander

LACMA website now offers downloadable images

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has retooled their online collection to include nearly 20,000 high-resolution images of artworks it “believes to be in the public domain”.  Those images known to be otherwise protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights must be requested. For more information on using of LACMA’s digital images, consult the museum’s Terms of Use.

NMC Horizon Report on higher ed and technology

The NMC Horizon Report > 2013 Higher Education Edition “describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.” The report is available here, as well as the working “short list” from which the advisory board took its final discussion points and the wiki link to that discussion selection “workspace.”

Last year’s Museum Edition report can be found here.

New online resource for Gothic architecture

The team at the Media Center for Art  History at Columbia University have, over the past five years, put together a wonderful catalogue of photos, drawings, and plans of French Gothic architecture.  The site, Mapping Gothic France, lets the end user explore the content through the dimensions of Space, Time and Narrative.  The site also includes interactive maps, panoramas, and plans that show the angle and position of each photo.  And – the tools allow the user to do building comparisons (e.g. by nave height, aisle width, floor plan, elevation, and more).   A really wonderful use of new technologies.

Thinglink – a new way to make images interactive

Thinglink is a new tool that lets you add multiple interactive elements to an image or page.   It could be very useful, for example, in linking websites, photos or events to a map (click the map below for an example).   It is used a lot in filmmaking and advertising, but has potential in educational uses.  It is apparently fairly easy to use, and there are some good examples and tips on the website.   If you try it out, please share your examples!

Popol Vuh (Wuj) Online

The Ohio State University Libraries has published an online edition of the Popol Vol (Wuj) from the Newberry Library in Chicago. The manuscript (sometimes translated as Book of the Community) is the creation account of the Quiché (K’iche’) Mayan people — their stories of the cosmologies, origins, traditions, and spiritual history. According to the Newberry, their Popol Vuh was most likely copied from this original manuscript (now lost) in 1701-03, in the Guatemalan town of Chichicastenango, by Dominican Father Francisco Ximenez.

The mission of the OSU online edition is to “allow native peoples and scholars to work directly with Father Ximénez’s manuscript, leading to debates about handwriting, spelling, and the polemics of the boundaries of meanings and interpretations.” The site offers transcriptions of the original K’iche’, as well as translations into Spanish and English.

Engaging topics abound on Ottoman History Podcast

Launched in Spring of 2011, Ottoman History Podcast is an online radio program dedicated to accessible and academic discussion of new topics in the history, society and culture of the Ottoman Empire and Middle East. Guests and contributors include over 40 scholars and students from a variety of disciplines. To date there are 83 podcast entries (with two more forthcoming), and each episode page not only posts the podcast, but a bibliography on the subject being discussed (for a more extensive bibliography, click here). The site also offers an image collection (organized by topic and hosted on Flickr), archival documents (tagged by topic, location, and or historic figure), historical maps, and musical selections with track lists.

Second Fall IRC workshop on Nov. 2

The second workshop offered through the IRC will take place on Friday, November 2, 3-4pm in Ellison 1811.  The topic is “Maximizing Online Image Resources & New Image Technology”, led by Jackie Spafford.  All are welcome.

This workshop will cover overviews of:

• image size and resolution, and best downloading protocol
• ARTstor’s growing collection and its newest features
• other rich online resources such as MDID, Flickr, SAHARA, Google Art Project, and various museum and library collections
• ways to optimize image searches using tools such as Reverse Image Searching and ways to optimize storage using tools such as Zotero

Please send any special topic requests for this workshop to Jackie:
spafford@hfa.ucsb.edu

Fall quarter IRC workshops

Now that Fall quarter is underway, we at the IRC would like to welcome back faculty, and new and returning graduate students.  We are offering a series of instructional workshops this quarter, and in future quarters we will repeat some and offer others.

The first workshop will be on Friday, October 19, 3-4pm in Ellison 1811.  The topic is “Creating Grade books in Excel”, led by Christine Fritsch-Hammes.  This workshop is targeted at TAs, but all are welcome to attend.

Upcoming workshop topics include “Photoshop Tools and Tips”, “Maximizing Online Image Resources”, and “Image Copyright”.  Dates will be announced on this blog in the coming weeks.

California moves forward on free digital textbook access

Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that will provide popular textbooks to California students as free downloads.  The first stage includes State funding for 50 open-source digital textbooks.  The second stage will be to establish an Open Source host/library.  The goal is to lighten the high prices students now pay for textbooks.

It will be interesting to see if any art history texts make the cut – the images constitute a big can of worms…

via The Atlantic